Category Archives: School

In my final term of university, a lot of the courses I take are meant to be credit whores, meaning I really don’t want to care about them, I just want the credits and I want to get out of there.

Lots of people probably don’t understand this kind of thinking without context, and here it is: I HATE MY MAJOR.

“How can you hate your major, you chose it?”

Trust me, no one is harder on me about this than me. With every course I take I feel like I’m furthering my doom. 22, and no skills to transfer to a work-place? Growing up sucks, especially when you’re a loser.

But the one good thing about my university experience is my minor: Psychology. I don’t think I’ll ever pursue a career in the field, because I’m just not driven enough. There are a lot of things that I want to do in life, and psych is not one of them. However, it is FASCINATING, and in most cases I can always look forward to going to psych lectures and understanding more about myself and the people around me.

However, like I said before, this is my LAST TERM, which means I CAN SEE THE END, I can almost TOUCH IT, so whatever energy was in my reserve to care about anything is almost completely drained. Nonetheless I still think my psych courses are interesting, especially personality psych.

Except I HATE IT.

And for the longest time I had no idea why I hated it so much. Was it the material? Definitely not. Although personality psych is one side of the spectrum, and biased onto itself, it is still interesting to explore aspects of personality and understand a bit of what might go on behind the scenes to drive a person’s behaviour.

Did I hate the prof? She was cheerful, seemingly friendly, and her lectures and engaging to a point. Granted she seems lazy and never shows up to our exams and showed two whole movies, but there was no reason to hate her for that.

Perhaps it was her slides. They are overly simplified, and a lot of the points are kind of useless because they’re so obvious. This isn’t a first year psych course, but it sure feels like one from reading the slides. For a while I decided that yeah, I hated this course because everything was too simple, too black and white. It was one or the other, and no spectrum in between, and the personality traits were treated as good and bad. People who are extraverted are the perfect definition of a healthy mind, and those who are high in neuroticism need help because they are prone to anxiety and depression. That’s not the whole truth, and I know that because this isn’t the first psych course I’ve taken, but it’s presented without any other alternatives. It makes me feel like she doesn’t care enough to go into the details, that she only cares about our results on the midterm and not our learning. It sucks learning about aggression when she presents aggression and violence in males so stereotypically, without bothering to go into any causes and theories. Men are angry because they’re testosterony. End of story? According to her lectures? Yes.

But I didn’t write a rant about her because her lecture notes are so one-dimensional, because I realized that that’s actually not the reason why I hate her class. The real reason is that all this information about personality is presented as though there was a right way for people to exist. If you have an unhealthy attachment with your parents as a child, then chances are, you will be fucked up and that’s too bad for you because that’s wrong and good luck with that in the future. Too bad you’re neurotic because in this society you’re a freak. You should try to be more extraverted because those people are born right, but well don’t try too hard because you CAN’T change who you are. Depressed? You need to correct your existence because look at the general population. They are happy 65% of the time while you are sad and pathetic! Everyone in the world should be happy and content most of the time, so why aren’t you like that?

I’m probably biased myself, because I’m neurotic, and introverted and have a tendency to be depressed very often. I have a very unhealthy attachment style and every now and then I feel like there’s no point to anything because I’m useless. But never in any other classrooms have I felt so personally attacked because of the way I am, simply because of the way a slide is worded, and in this cases its not one slide, it’s almost all of them. I’m not even a minority, I’m just human and I am, for some reason, wrong.

To me, being neurotic is a way of life, but in a lot of ways I am like a lot of people. I have breakdowns where I cry my eyes out and snot is just guzzling out of my nose. I have excellent days where I feel like I can conquer the world and I am the only person I want to be. At my set-point I am probably less “happy” than the average person, and because of that happiness to me is not real, and that’s how I cope with being who I am. I don’t have a white-picket personality, but you know what, that’s what’s normal, bitch, because nobody does.

After I climbed out of that pit that was 2011 I don’t really like to gripe about how shitty life is because I have rediscovered things in life that I want to do again, but because of school I actually wish I was dead so I don’t have to deal with it.

I’ve pinpointed a sign of relapse into the “bad place”, and that’s an unquenchable thirst to play games. This is actually how I dealt with the Bad Year. Gaming provides “cheap thrills” while wasting a lot of time that I cannot afford, especially when I need to be working on other stuff. There was a period of time at the end of summer 2012 when I was so motivated to work on my personal projects that there was no need for “cheap thrills”. I had absolutely no desire to play any kind of games whatsoever, because there was something more productive out there that is both rewarding and exciting for me to do.

Now that I find myself tormented by academic obligations, the warning symptoms are slowly beginning to creep up on me.

I keep saying that I’ll stop ranting about school, because school is something that I have to get through, and complaining is counter productive, but when it comes down to it, school is just not a place where I thrive. It’s slowly eating me alive and making me hate everything.

But I’m not saying school is wrong. There are people who are masters at it, people who are more patient, more tolerant, and have greater abilities of undergoing hardships, and even people who have moved past it and are able to utilize school for their own means; people who are natural geniuses, who are tuned into the academic frequency. I’m just saying it’s just not right for me.

So what do I do?

I’ve found motivations for life, for happiness and for the creative processes. I’ve been trying to find motivations for school, and every now and then I think I’ve honed in on one, because although I believe I’m mostly self-sufficient in most other aspects of life, I am heavily reliant on inspirators as a motivational force.

Perhaps the inspiration comes from a certain text that I have to read, or from a professor, or a fellow student, but the inspiration is short-lived. In the end my degree of not caring is greater than the inspiration. Is this possibly because I am in a major that I don’t thoroughly enjoy? I should wish that it was, but I’ve explored many fields of my faculty (the only faculty in which I believe I belong: Arts). For visual arts I felt that a grading system was pointless and the students pretentious, and I was creatively blocked for a year by taking creative writing courses because of the narrow style the program focused on. At a basic level, PSYC is the only department that I have an affinity for, but regardless of how much I like it, I simply do not excel in an academic environment.

Does this sound like I’m making excuses for being stupid? Maybe. I certain feel stupid when I’m on campus. I also feel a lot of pressure from people that assume my loyalty to academia because of my enrolment in university.

What am I even talking about any more? I have a midterm and a presentation tomorrow, and I would like to sleep before midnight, but I don’t see that happening.

But by writing this I’m not trying to come to any solutions or concrete answers. What I’m going through isn’t an object problem that could be solved, it’s more of a subjective, internal dilemma that will probably continue until I’m done with school. Talking about it like this just makes me feel better, most of the time.

Then why post it on a blog instead of writing it down in a journal somewhere if I’m not looking for answers? I guess it’s a natural narcissistic tendency. It makes me feel better to imagine that perhaps someone might read this and that might ignite a certain train of thought in them, and that I was responsible for that spark of internal monologue. It’s not like I’m really expecting something truly profound to happen, it is just helpful to imagine it.

That’s how I am motivated most of the time. A = something that I want to one day achieve. B = a source of inspiration (could be unrelated or related), either a person, a piece of artwork or an event. C = the potential of what could be in relation to B if I achieve A. I don’t know why I used letters to substitute those things, because there isn’t really any formula that happens. I guess A + B creates C in my mind, which creates D the motivation which might make A true some day. I don’t think I’m making any sense.

An example would be: A = I want a ferret. A source of inspiration (B) could be a person with a cool ferret. C would be dreaming that if I had a ferret, then I could go to the cool ferret conference and meet that cool ferret. D would be the motivation which will make me work for the money to buy the ferret, which might render C true in a universe where there are cool ferret conferences.